FREEPORT — Denny Garkey didn’t know for sure if the Chicago Cubs would allow him to build Little Cubs Field.

It was one of the big hurdles he had in order to turn his idea of Little Cubs Field into reality.

Garkey pitched his idea during a phone conversation with then-Cubs president John McDonough in 2002.

“(McDonough) said, ‘I’ll have our legal team look into it and have our board of directors review what you’ve requested and I’ll get back to you,’” Garkey said. “I’m going, ‘Alright, this is going to be nine months and he’s going to forget about this.’

“Ten days later, he called me and said, ‘We just had our board meeting and they thought it was a really good idea. Our legal department said, as long as you give them the rights to do it, it’s fine. It’ll be good marketing and it’ll be good for baseball.’”

Six years later, Little Cubs Field had its first opening day in April 28, 2008, and has been expanding since. The venue hosts youth sports such as Little League, T-ball, Wiffle Ball and kickball leagues among other events. New additions to Little Cubs Field include left-field bleachers, which are set to debut this summer.

“We add things to it every year,” Garkey said. “We’ll look at the right-field bleachers eventually if we can raise enough money to do it. It’s been a fun thing.”

While Little Cubs Field is in Freeport, Garkey’s idea was spawned at a bar in Black Earth, Wisconsin, in the early 2000s.

After talking things over with his wife and getting the OK from the Chicago Cubs, Garkey and the newly assembled Little Cubs Field board members — president Mark Winter, secretary Lorrie Bingner and treasurer Jeff Williams — asked McDonough for photos and actual clippings of ivy at Wrigley Field. He also asked for Ron Santo’s phone number “so he can be a spokesperson for what we want to do.”

Page 2 of 2 - From 2006, when it was announced that Little Cubs Field was being built as a replica of Wrigley Field, until it opened in 2008, communities throughout the area volunteered time and resources to build it from the ground up, including area construction workers.

“I went to a lot of construction people in the area and got handshake deals and said if we could raise money for the materials, we will do all the labor work free,” Garkey said. “What that means is, here’s $400,000 worth of labor for nothing.

“We had a website and about $100 in the bank. But we said we were going to do this. Bricklayers were working for nothing. The community helped put people into hotels for free and restaurants fed them for free while they worked here. It was just pretty amazing during the period. It’s been successful ever since.”

The left-field bleachers will be made possible through community donations.

Little Cubs Field has been a big tourist attraction in Stephenson County for several years.

“The (Stephenson County) Visitors Bureau ran our gift shop for three years and put out an estimate that Little Cubs Field brings into Freeport about $300,000 a year in commerce and tourism,” Garkey said.

Garkey’s always been a big thinker and is looking for ways to get Little Cubs Field more exposure in the future.

“It’s been successful but we have a ways to go,” he said. “The next step that jumps us out into the national level will be when Little Cubs Field is featured in a national commercial or Hollywood movie that has a segment like the Bad News Bears, where they play at Little Cubs Field.

“We’re hoping people go, ‘Where is that? Is that a real place?’ Yeah, it is, just like Field of Dreams is a real place. So there you go. For that to happen, we’re on a website called filminglocations.com so people can find us if they’re looking to do something like that.”